Real-Time Energy-Efficient Reliable Traffic Aware Routing for Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks

Many industrial wireless sensor network (IWSN) applications require real-time communications in which bounded delay requirements need to be satisfied. IWSN lossy links and limited resources of sensor nodes pose significant challenges for supporting real-time applications. Many IWSN routing algorithms focus on being energy efficient to extend the network lifetime, but the delay wasn't the main concern. However, these algorithms are unable to deal with real-time applications in which data packets need to be delivered to the sink node within a predefined real-time information. On the other hand, the most existing real-time routing schemes are often based on the desired deadline time (required delivery time) and end-to-end distance in the selection of forwarding node while the reliability of on-time data delivery, the effects of a collision, energy balance, and a number of a hop count to the sink node have largely been ignored. These issues can dramatically impact real-time performance. Therefore, the paper proposes a routing algorithm that achieves a balance between energy efficiency and reliability while being suitable for real-time applications as well. In addition, it reduces the effects of congestion by sufficiently utilizing the underloaded nodes to improve network throughput. Finally, the hop count to the sink is considered. This paper formulates the real-time routing problem into 0/1 Integer Linear Programming (ILP) problem and then proposes a Real-time Energy-Efficient Traffic-Aware approach (RTERTA) to solve the optimization problem for a large-scale IWSN. From the obtained simulation results, the proposed solution has proved to be able to enhance the network performance in terms of packets miss ratio, average end-to-end delay, packets delivery rate, as well as network lifetime.